Five Implicated in Terrorist Activity Associated with Suspected Bombers Mosque

In Wednesday’s USA Today, Oren Dorell offers a substantive piece of reporting on the Boston mosque attended by the Tsarnaev brothers, the suspects in last Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings. In this dangerous age of political correctness, Dorell’s reporting is surprisingly blunt, and therefore troubling. What is most unnerving is the news that, not counting Dzokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a total of five attendees and/or officials implicated in terrorist activities have been associated with this particular mosque.

One of those officials, as my colleague Kerry Picket reported on earlier, is Abdurahman Alamoudi, who helped to found the mosque in 1981. In 2004, Ala moudi was sentenced to 23 years in a federal prison for his role in a plot to assassinate Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah (who is now king).

There is also Jamal Badawi of Canada, a one-time trustee of the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), the organization that owns both the mosque the Tsarnaev brothers attended and its sister mosque in Boston. In 2007, Badawi was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a Texas terrorism trial surrounding the funneling of money to Hamas through the Holy Land Foundation.

More from USA Today:

Aafia Siddiqui, who occasionally prayed at the Cambridge mosque, was arrested in Afghanistan in 2008 while in possession of cyanide canisters and plans for a chemical attack in New York City. She tried to grab a rifle while in detention and shot at military officers and FBI agents, for which she was convicted in New York in 2010 and is serving an 86-year sentence.

Tarek Mehanna, who worshiped at the Cambridge mosque, was sentenced in 2012 to 17 years in prison for conspiring to aid al-Qaeda. Mehanna had traveled to Yemen to seek terrorist training and plotted to use automatic weapons to shoot up a mall in the Boston suburbs, federal investigators in Boston alleged.

Ahmad Abousamra, the son of a former vice president of the Muslim American Society Boston Abdul-Badi Abousamra, was identified by the FBI as Mehanna’s co-conspirator. He fled to Syria and is wanted by the FBI on charges of providing support to terrorists and conspiracy to kill Americans in a foreign country.

You can read the full USA Today piece here and Picket’s extensive reporting here.